Roku and Nielsen have launched a major partnership that could reshape the future of media measurement and TV advertising as the market becomes increasingly focused on streaming.
With the alliance, Roku will buy Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising (AVA) business, which includes Nielsen’s video automatic content recognition (ACR) and dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technologies. The goal — to accelerate Roku’s launch of a DAI solution with TV programmers, making TV ads more intelligent and addressable.
In addition, Nielsen and Roku will integrate complementary Nielsen ad and content measurement products into the Roku platform and advance Nielsen ONE, the company’s cross-media measurement solution.
“Tens of billions of dollars continue to be spent annually on traditional TV advertising,” said Roku’s Louqman Parampath, VP of Product Management, in the partnership release. “Combining Nielsen’s AVA technology with Roku’s innovative ad tech and scale will enable us to deliver the benefits of TV streaming advertising to traditional TV. Roku will bring the promise of DAI to the market for the first time ever at scale — providing better targeting and measurement for advertisers, creating easy integration and additional revenue opportunities for programmers’ ad sales teams, and improving the TV experience for viewers.”
The two companies will enter into a long-term commercial agreement to leverage Total Ad Ratings (TAR) on the Roku platform. Specifically, Roku’s media sales and ad-buying platform, OneView, will natively integrate Nielsen “always on” Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) for advertisers. Roku will also enable publishers to implement Nielsen Digital Content Ratings (DCR).
“We’re also excited to become a key strategic partner for Nielsen in their new cross-media measurement products, and jointly drive towards greater transparency and accuracy in TV streaming measurement,” added Parampath.
Scott Brown, GM of Audience Measurement at Nielsen had this to say about the deal: “As Roku brings the power of dynamic ad insertion to all forms of TV, we’re excited to help monetize the addressable market by measuring smart TV as a currency, which Nielsen can do at scale.”
The collaboration with Roku will significantly expand the footprint of smart TVs and other devices, nearing 100 million in total, in which Nielsen can enable media sellers and buyers to measure and better monetize addressable advertising.
The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021.
